MotoGP | Quartararo disappointed by the news: “We’re doing the same or worse”

The first Friday back from the summer break seemed to have started on the right foot for Fabio Quartararo, who had managed to get into the top 10 at the end of the morning free practice. However, in the decisive session of the day (and also of the weekend), the Yamaha rider was unable to go beyond 16th position, with a gap of over 1.3 seconds from the leader of the day Jorge Martin.

Yamaha had brought some new features to Silverstone, but once again they didn’t seem to meet the Frenchman’s expectations. The rider from Nice, in fact, said he was rather disappointed by what he saw on the track, especially because he was expecting a step forward that would allow him to get closer to the riders in front of him. Once again, this M1 seems to have been successfully revolutionized, only to find itself once again lagging behind, amid complaints from its star rider.

“We are very far away, there is no explanation,” said Quartararo at the end of Friday’s free practice for the British Grand Prix, which will see him forced to go through Q1 in tomorrow’s qualifying. “I expected much better progress with the new features brought for this race. Unfortunately, it is not as we expected. We need to analyze and understand why we were so slow so we can improve tomorrow.”

“I expected much more from these innovations, but unfortunately they didn’t really work. I’m a bit disappointed, but we need to do more laps, try and get used to it, but we are always in the same position or worse. We need to see what we can really improve to be closer to the others,” continues Quartararo.

Second The Devilthe gap between the Yamaha and the other bikes is visible to the naked eye. The Frenchman says he feels really at the limit, squeezing everything out of his bike only to find himself far behind in the timesheets: “I feel like I’m at the limit everywhere, but the time is slow. I was behind Jorge Martin when he did his time and I felt slow because he was a second away. You can clearly see the limits of the bike, we know where they come from, but it’s not something we can manage. The sensations are not good on the bike at the moment”.

If the new things don’t work, will it be time to go back and use the old setup? “Honestly, I don’t know yet. But I think it’s difficult for us to try a bike, switch to another and then another… Even if you don’t really see progress, I think it’s right to stick to one bike and not make permanent changes, at least to gather information and take the bike to the absolute limit,” concludes the Nice native.